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Old St. Ferdinand Shrine

Florissant, today the most populous city in St. Louis County, was founded about 1786 by the Spanish colonial government as St. Ferdinand de Florissant, named for Ferdinand III of Castile, a first cousin of St. Louis IX of France.  The valley here was called “fleurissant” by French trappers for its flowering or flourishing vegetation.  The official name of the city remained St. Ferdinand until 1939.  The first church was built on the original town square, a few blocks northeast of here.  Philippine-Rose Duchesne began a convent for her Sisters of the Sacred Heart on the banks of Coldwater Creek in 1819, a year after her arrival from Grenoble in southwest France.  Her Federal-style convent housed parish and boarding schools and a novitiate.  She later founded schools in St. Charles and St. Louis, of which Duchesne Academy and Maryville University are successors.  St. Philippine was canonized in 1988.  Her shrine is in St. Charles, but the Florissant convent is one of only two surviving buildings where she lived and worked.

In view of the sisters’ good works, the church fathers wisely decided to move the church to this location in 1821.  The new church was Neoclassical in style, predating the Old Cathedral in St. Louis by more than a decade.  The new front and steeple added between 1877 and 1884 give the building an Italian Romanesque appearance, but it remains the oldest church in the metropolitan area after the 1799 Church of the Holy Family in Cahokia, Illinois.  The church forms an interlocking complex with the convent and the rectory added in 1840, as the side buildings serve as transepts opening directly into the church.  The sisters could observe the mass from the ground floor or from a workroom on the second floor.  The Sisters of Loretto took over the parish in 1847 and over the years added at least five large buildings, of which only the brick school to the south of the rectory survives.  The high altar, installed about 1880, incorporates relics of St. Valentine in a life-size wax figure in a glass crypt.

The church and its adjacent school served until 1955 when a large new parish complex was constructed several miles away on Charbonier Road.  Three years later the Friends of Old St. Ferdinand stepped in to save and maintain the historic buildings.  The biggest challenge faced by the Friends was a fire in 1966 that extensively damaged the roof, but that was repaired with donations received from as far away as Switzerland.  The land surrounding the church buildings is now a city park.

The Chamber Chorus is pleased to pay its first visit to the Shrine in 2008, the fiftieth anniversary year of the Friends of Old St. Ferdinand